Hi Misterbit,

You can change to the "always enhanced" security option so FunCaptcha always shows three challenges. See how to do it here:
http://support.funcaptcha.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1760933-what-is-%E2%80%9Csecurity-level%E2%80%9D-in-the-options-

Kind regards,
Matt

Hi Alex48,

How do you know it is a guess exploit? Did you see the attacker getting FunCaptcha wrong more often than right?

You are correct that at default settings, an attacker using a lot of clean IPs (which have no bad record of failing FunCaptcha and are not on the StopForumSpam list) can do a guessing attack which solves FC 1/8th of the time. With massive quantities against a sensitive faucet, that can be significant. You can address this by going to your FunCaptcha dashboard and setting your security to "Always enhanced". This means that the best results a guessing attack can get is 1/512. Or, if you tolerate the guessing attack for a little while, the pool of clean IPs will become tainted and guessing will no longer work well.

As an identity (basically IP, though we are always improving this to extend beyond IP) builds up a poor record of solving FunCaptcha (which random guessing will do), the number of required FunCaptcha challenges increases, making guessing highly impractical. If needed, we can strengthen this further-- just contact us to arrange it. You can see more here:
http://support.funcaptcha.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1760933-what-is-%E2%80%9Csecurity-level%E2%80%9D-in-the-options-
http://support.funcaptcha.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1838700-why-do-i-sometimes-need-to-do-more-or-fewer-game-challenges-

I'm sorry to hear this affected your faucet and with this explanation, I hope you switch back to FunCaptcha. We will keep making it stronger all the time-- and we are literally the only company in the world entirely and actively dedicated to making the best CAPTCHA.

Kind regards,
Matt
COO, FunCaptcha

Always glad to talk about it 

Hi krishnapramod,

The short answer is that FunCaptcha can vary from 1 to 5 challenges depending on the settings chosen by the website (the faucet) and the past history of the user. So, sometimes you have to pick the woman once, sometimes three times, sometimes five times before you can claim. When you've done enough challenges, the footer under FunCaptcha tells you that you're done. More is explained here:
http://support.funcaptcha.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1838700-why-do-i-sometimes-need-to-do-more-or-fewer-game-challenges-

A site can pick the "always enhanced" setting in their FunCaptcha dashboard to make sure the number of challenges never falls below 3. You also can contact us for even more advanced settings if you think you see bots getting through. We give a wide range of settings which at one extreme are always very easy for all users to complete fast, and at the other extreme are the very strongest protection against bots. We adjust it automatically for a site, but the site can request a different setting.

What you experienced was FC's setting in which you can solve just one image to pass. You must have at one point seen FunCaptcha with three challenges, then solved it, which improved your user history enough for FC to give you just one challenge the next time.

To experiment with this, come to https://www.funcaptcha.com/demo/ and try getting FC right a few times in a row, then wrong a few times in a row. You will see how the number of challenges goes as low as one or as high as five.

Last point: if FunCaptcha asks you to rotate a LOGO the right way up, instead of an animal, or to pick "your favourite", it does not matter how you answer. This is done on purpose for a few obscure reasons and never is counted as one of the challenges.

I hope this helps, and thanks for starting the discussion.

Matt
FunCaptcha creator

That's right Gifted, AWS gave everyone a really bad night, including Netflix, Tinder, Amazon, and IMDb... we actually weathered it better than most as we manually swapped our traffic away from US-EAST, which caused some slowness but still let us keep serving up FunCaptcha. Here's an article on the outage: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/

It's very rare for AWS to fail so badly. Even so we are not satisfied and are looking for ways to "fail over" much faster and more gracefully. We know we need to be up and running 24/7 and unlike Netflix or Tinder, if we go down, important things can't get done.

Don't give up hope NightHavoc! We are the only company in the world totally dedicated to stopping bots with a CAPTCHA that really works and does not totally annoy its users. Look for "FunCaptcha" in this thread and all over the web for testimonials about how we are really stopping the problem.

We know it's an endless war and we are always staying ahead of the bots.. let us know how we are doing. We can adjust FC to various security levels to trade off ease of use vs. security.

Hi all,

We apologize for the interruption in FunCaptcha service. Last night our server provider, Amazon Web Services, had a major outage. More information can be seen at http://status.aws.amazon.com/ and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/. AWS provides services to the biggest sites in the world, including Amazon.com. It’s very rare for them to have this kind of outage, and they are the best in the world. Unfortunately last night was an exception. Our 24×7 admin team, working at all hours, immediately adapted to the outage but it created service interruptions. We restored full services as quickly as possible and now all is well.

We are sorry for the loss to both faucet webmasters and their customers. We are going to make changes and work with Amazon to better “bulletproof” FunCaptcha services.

More information about our service can be found at https://twitter.com/FunCaptchaStat/ as it happens.

We know you depend on FunCaptcha to be available 24×7 and we are not satisfied with anything less than perfect service. We will continue to work to make things better. Please let us know how we are doing.

Kind regards,
Matt

Hi Racey,

FunCaptcha automatically falls back to simpler modes (including audio) if it's not confident it will run well on your configuration. But we fully support Chrome/Firefox/IE etc so there must be something else interfering. I have alerted customer support to look out for your report. Can you please just paste what you said into an email to support@funcaptcha.com? They will get back to you with any help you need. Please send along screenshots and details of your configuration. We'd really appreciate it because we want to work perfectly on every config.

As for five vs ten numerical answers, that is because the logic of the 3rd party service we use for audio CAPTCHA has varying levels of "suspicion" about your activity. I know the harder version is way too hard to do! The real solution is to figure out why you can't get the visual FunCaptcha working, since that's very easy and quick to do.

Hi uchijashisui,

We definitely do work in Mozilla and Opera so we can help you get FunCaptcha running there. I have alerted customer support to look out for your report. Can you please just paste what you said into an email to support@funcaptcha.com? They will get back to you with any help you need.

Hi Ragi,

Sorry they are a bit creepy-- they are computer-generated for security reasons and as we know, the "uncanny valley" can be a bit weird. We are working on new ones with different tradeoffs of security vs creepiness.

Meanwhile, a site can contact us with their details (URL or public key), and ask for their FunCaptcha to be customized so it shows one particular game by default-- in this case you'd want them to show the "roll the ball" puzzle.

Also, if you click the little refresh button in the footer of FunCaptcha it reloads with a different game (unless the site owner has disabled that).

Hope this helps, and thanks for the feedback.

Hi all-- I am the creator of FunCaptcha. I really appreciate the discussion of how well it is working... especially that quote above that shows how bots responded when you switched. We try to add to our "case studies" of great user stories like this. FaucetWorld, please contact us or reply here to let me know if it's OK to use your quote and your chart to show people how well FunCaptcha works.

Also, if you have any problems, I will try to answer them here. But your best first stop is our support page (click the ? mark in the footer of FC). There are good FAQs there and a way to submit a support request.

If you like videos, search for us on YouTube. I'd link them here but don't want an algorithm to falsely accuse me of being a spammer.

Hopefully subscribing to posts here will work, and I will try to answer back soon if anything comes up. Meanwhile, enjoy FunCaptcha. Keep in mind we offer a few different security levels that trade off bot-proof vs usability, so if you do suspect bots getting through, contact us so we can work together on your settings.